Research Group

Language, Logic and Information

Non-Technical Description

The aim of research in Language, Logic and Information (LLI) is to
endow computer systems with the ability to process natural language.
This ability is essential for applications such as information
retrieval and web search, information extraction and data mining,
text summarization, and speech technology. Techniques for
morphological analysis, part-of-speech tagging, word prediction, or
term extraction are already in use in real-world applications in
these areas, and the technology required for applications such as
news summarization or spoken dialogue systems (e.g., systems that
can engage in a dialogue with customers to give information about
train timetables) is already at a very advanced state of
development.
The LLI group carries out research in semantics, corpus-based
research and web applications. It covers more theoretical areas as
well as very practical natural language engineering (NLE) projects.

Technical Overview

The University of Essex is an
established centre for research in computational linguistics and
natural language engineering, with groups in departments
including Language and
Linguistics and the Data
Archive as well as the School of Computer Science and
Electronic Engineering (CSEE). The
Language and Computation group has been created to facilitate
the interaction of researchers working on computational processing
of language across the University.

One of the main areas of strength of the LLI group in the
School of Computer Science and
Electronic Engineering is semantics and semantic processing,
both from a theoretical and from an application oriented point of
view. Our research in this area includes work on the logical
foundations of semantics (Fox), on
psychologically motivated computational models of semantic
processing (Poesio), on the
acquisition from texts ('text mining') of lexical and commonsense
knowledge (Kruschwitz, Poesio,
Sanchez-Graillet), used, e.g., in anaphora resolution (Poesio),
and in applications such as web search and information retrieval (Kruschwitz, Robinson). A
second area of interest is dialogue and speech. Several members of
the group are interested in agent-based models of dialogue, used,
e.g., in interfaces to web search systems and spoken dialogue (Fasli,
Kruschwitz,
Poesio), and we are
actively involved in the organization of the annual
workshops on the Semantics and Pragmatics of
Dialogue. A third area of interest is natural language
generation technology. Finally, there is a tradition at Essex for
work in NL processing for the Arabic language (Poesio),
and in machine translation (Arnold,
Sadler).

Other researchers in the Language and Computation Group are
interested in Constraint-Based grammars formalisms (Arnold,
Borsley,
Sadler) and in
statistical and symbolic parsing (Arnold,
Borsley). There is also
an active interest in cognitively motivated theories of language (Clahsen,
Felser, EisenbeissPoesio).

INSPIRE
(Intelligent Support for People Orientated Process Re-engineering
and Change Management). (Partially funded by the European
Commission's
Information Society Technologies Programme, project number
IST-1999-10387.) Started in 1999 for 30 months (Fox)